My son has been really down the past few days. He has been slowly working his way through a really good group of friends. Every time he relapses he loses another one. Of course, I don’t see him actually making the connection that his addiction is the major cause for all his “friend” problems. Now, his best friend is really sick of the drama that surrounds my son and has either given up on J or is taking some time away….either way I don’t blame him at all.

All of the above seems logical and probable, right? Then someone please tell me why I found myself texting his best friend to tell him to be nicer to J and did he know so and so’s number, so I could call them too. I am one sick dude. I think I need an intervention.

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About madyson007

I am a mom of 4 who thought she was home free when my oldest son went off to college. My serious blunder? Genetics and being naive or maybe just plain stupid.

15 Responses to I have reached a new low…

i think you are a wonderful mom for caring so much about your son. you deserve an award for trying to take a pro-active stance in his life. my therapist told me of a book called “parenting with love and logic” by jim fey. i think it has wonderful ways of teaching me to allow my teenager to have her anger and life and not get in the middle of everything.

i so want to fix it and make it all better. but that is her job not mine it is up to her to forgive me. i cannot make her do anything, she has to find her own way. and it sucks.

i have the same problem with my 3 year old, i want to hold her all night long because soon she will be a teenager and not want me anymore. i have to check my motives and allow my children to make their mistakes. i pray to God that they do not choose the same path as i did.

but there is not much else i can do. i still feel the anxiety when she walks out the door. it is so hard not to go rifle through her personal effects in her room. when i get the urge to snoop i call my sponsor and check my motives first, sometimes there is a good reason to snoop, but how addictive that becomes!! take it easy on yourself, your human, not perfect. that doesn’t make you a bad mom, neither does his addiction!!

get yourself a strong group of women that can help guide you through these times, nar-anon or al-anon would really help you i think.

At least you recognize that you need help. So long as you are taking the steps to get better (Alanon/Naranon, reading recovery blogs, reading Co-dependency books, therapy, etc.), then recognize that you will relapse.

You’re not sick. You’re a mom. But, that said, you’re a mom with a son swimming through muddy addiction and he is having trouble finding oxygen. Of course that hurts you. But to email his friends and ask them to “be there for him” is really asking them to interrupt the very process that is necessary for him to realize the reality of his addiction. If you do call or text them, why not ask them to tell him that they care about him but until he gets help and learns to care about himself, they can’t give him what he needs to get through this.

I think it’s commendable that his friends don’t want to be co-dependent.

You have so much going on and are so torn. You need people who are experts to give you advice on how to handle this, how to speak to his friends, how to live through this trauma in your family. Asking us is reaching out. But I am not an expert so I may say something completely opposite of what is needed.

I guess what I am saying is this: I want to support you and let you know that you have people who care out here. But you also need people who care and who know WHAT to do and HOW to do it. I do want you to feel better. But isn’t it also important to talk to people who will help you GET better too?

I hope you hear the love and concern in this. There is no judgement or condemnation. You just need more that “there there” to get through to the other side of this…to the light and the recovery.

I think your words “I am one sick dude” are a really good sign. That means you recognize you are sick. Alcoholism/addiction is a family disease; it will make you just as ill as your son is, but in a different way.

To begin your own recovery, please try going to Alanon, if you haven’t already. I have a daughter who recently became addicted and developed a serious mentally illness at the same time. We went from thinking things were just fine to intense suicidal drama within just a few months. The stress and anxiety almost killed me.

Alanon has helped me to learn to LET MY CHILD FACE THE LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF HER OWN BEHAVIOR. It’s a little like tough love, but we call it “detaching with love”. Alanon meetings give you a chance to talk to other parents who are dealing with the same sense of fear, obligation, and guilt. And you get phone numbers of members you can call any time when you need to talk.

Yes, you will relapse sometimes. That’s normal and okay. Be gentle on yourself when you do. It gets easier with practice and with more meetings. I was so stressed out at first that I went to about three meetings a week for the first month or so. And every time I left with a big piece of serenity. The more I work the Alanon, the longer the stretches of my serenity become. Now I go once or twice a week unless things are really bad, then I go more often.

A big bonus is that, as you heal yourself, you usually find that your relationship with your alcoholic/addict and other people improve as well. So if you won’t do it for yourself (even though you DESERVE it!), do it for your son.

Then someone please tell me why I found myself texting his best friend to tell him to be nicer to J and did he know so and so’s number, so I could call them too. I am one sick dude. I think I need an intervention.

Are you getting to your meetings?

Hard for me to reply when my children are no where near old enough to think about drinking. I pray the day never comes. You have so much strength dealing with this. We aren’t perfect. And knowing that what you did may not have been right is a good sign 🙂 so give yourself credit for seeing that.

I’ve done similar things. And I’ve been told call someone and discuss it before doing it. Define what your motive is? And ask yourself is doing this any of your business? Take some time and THINK 🙂

You’re a loving mom who hates to see her son hurting. I think that’s a very normal response. Do you think your son truly doesn’t get the connection between his friends disappearing and his drama filled life?

I don’t think you’re sick, just feeling the pain of your son’s poor choices. Its not something you learn in advance, none of us expect our kid to become an addict. You learn as you go.

I just ask myself: Are my actions supportive? Am I doing something for him that he is capable of doing for himself? Is what I am doing helpful or harmful?

In reading this post, I see what you’re doing and why. It’s like as parents we stumble through trying to do the right thing, trying to figure out what is the right thing, trying to figure out – do we do anything???
Barbara’s 3 questions at the end of her comment are a good guide of what to ask yourself before you do something. Even so, speaking for myself, I’ve done some things “right”, somethings “wrong” and somethings in between the two. But I have to believe that God is in control and whatever I do, I know I did the best I knew or was capable of at the time and no longer look back and beat up on myself (well, I TRY not to!)…
Do the best you can, and as mentioned above, Al-Anon is a great help if you aren’t already going…
God bless.

Having good sober friends is a real plus in recovery. So I agree this is a loss, and I understand why you would want to avoid the loss if you can.

It’s very unlikely that losing his friend isn’t going to be a net gain for his recovery (let alone result in recovery).

Your son’s friend is setting a personal boundary, which is his right. It’s probably best to respect that.

Depending on your history/relationship with your son and his friends, I don’t think it would necessarily be a bad thing to talk to his friend about his decision to understand it better. Maybe the friend’s need/intention is more complex than “I want nothing more to do with you son.”

It might be good for your son to have this conversation with his friend too, if that is something they seem capable of doing in a respectful and productive manner.

Addiction does effect family members. Some family dynamics are not healthy. Addiction also occurs in healthy families. It’s a stretch to say that addiction is always a “family disease.” Especially since parents are often told they have this “disease” the day after they find out their child has an addiction! Followed by being told that any effort they make to support their child is a “symptom” of this “disease.”

In your mind you know that it was probably not appropriate or at least ineffective to text J’s friends. That’s why you commented that “I am one sick dude.” However, in your heart you are caring and hurting for your son and his actions. And as parents of addicts, especially as we are finding our way through the murky waters, we reach out for whatever “fixes” we can put in place to assist our addicts, we hope in finding the right way…the path to recovery.

The reality is that you cannot “guilt” his friends into staying connected, especially if they do not like the choices J is making. It is not their job, just like in reality it is not yours. You did not Cause his addiction, you can’t Control his addiction and you can’t Cure his addiction.

If you are working on your own recovery (and blogging is part of that), and if you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to ready Melodie Beatty’s book, Codependent No More. You will find parts of it that feel as if they are written for you (and some won’t apply), but you will also start to learn tools to recover from your codependency. And in reality, your recovery will be the best thing you can model and do for J.

All that being said, we’ve all been there. I’ve tried to get my son’s friend involved, I’ve paid off drug dealers, I’ve corrected credit and fixed the car more times than I can count. None of that made a difference. Nothing changed except I felt worse and he continued to be addicted. When I truly started to apply the principles of leading a healthy, non codependent existence, I was able to make better decisions which impacted my son. And we are starting to reap the benefits of those decisions. Don’t be hard on yourself, continue to move forward and whatever you do, don’t give up Hope. (Sorry for going on and on…I do feel and completely understand your pain.)

I just wanted to say one more thing…I was very fortunate that Keven’s friends came to me and expressed their concern. I was able to tell them I understood why they didn’t want to see him anymore. I also told a couple of them how much it meant to me that they were sticking by his side (childhood friends that don’t use drugs). They are still around for him. I hope that your son’s friend(s) will realize that all this drama can, and will eventually, come to an end.

I am praying extra hard for you and J tonight. It just plains sucks sometimes. Its like you want to wave a magic wand, or hit rewind, or fast forward or something. None of us asked for this, did we? Hugs.

I feel for you and understand. My daughter’s ex-boyfriend keeps texting me and I am responding. I have no idea why when they used together,went to recovery at same time and you would think I would not want them together, however she has met some other people in recovery and has made friends with them. He doesn’t understand that and I guess I am keeping in touch with him because I know what he is about and I am scared for her friendships with the others and that they may trigger my daughter to use again.
She continues however to text him and get together with him so it confuses the issue. I told him yesterday I cannot continue to do this and I wish him well. I am making myself sick over this and I cannot control what happens and have to hope my daughter continues to make good decisions. I have found myself at times enabling again. How do you stop it cold turkey? How do you turn off the wanting to help your child? When do you set the rules when they are still in IOP and doing meetings every day. Is it realistic to make them work on top of all of that. Everyone else who has responded has alot more time in this than I do as my daughter is only 61 days clean.
My thoughts and prayers are with all of you.

There has been a lot of wise counsel for you in all of these comments. What you are doing is about you, not as much about your son as you believe or want to believe. Everyone is right, you can’t fix this for your son. In fact he needs this to happen there must be consequences to using and one of those consequences is people not using do not want users in their life. Nothing you can do will effect real change. You are just being desperate and desperation does not work well for parents of an addict. I know from first hand experience.

In fact we traveled this road so many times I actually included this very subject as a part of the 7 Truths That Took Me 5 Years To Learn:

5. Others Don’t Want Them Around

That is OK. He has wronged many people. We are the parents, it’s called unconditional love. It is not wrong for friends, brothers, sisters, grandparents, relatives to have their own feelings and pain about this situation. Some families have great support and no one abandons anyone, some people decide they do not want the trouble of an addict in their life. That is OK. We all get to make the choice and there is no wrong choice, it is just a choice by those people.

It is healthy what your sons friends are doing. It is not wrong for them to leave it is not right for them to stay.

The most important thing is for YOU to stay in his life. Unconditional love knows no illness and is not swayed by disease. But please, love without enabling.

So much great wisdom. All I can say is this– it hurts me to see my son hurt. You’re not sick. I finally came to grips that my son’s good friends dropped him because they don’t want to be around the drugs and drama. My son has been clean and sober for three months. He longs for those friends to come back. I keep telling him to wait and prove that he’s the friend they once hand– three months isn’t long enough.
I’ve done what you’ve done, before. Now, I see my son is realizing he was the problem and he’s maturing.
Hang in there.